Biblical · Reformed · Evangelical · Thought-Provoking
TheologyBurnett's teacher George Lindbeck once told him the mainline church was dead and the only question was whether evangelicalism was the seven demons coming into the corpse. Twenty-five years later, Burnett asks whether either side of that bleak diagnosis still has anything theological to live on.
Luther asked how a sinner is made right with God. Calvin asked an even prior question: how is God rightly worshiped? Taylor argues that the Reformation's deepest legacy is the Reformed insistence that justification exists for the sake of worship, and worship is the goal toward which salvation tends.
Does the Bible belong to the church or the church to the Bible? McConnell traces the Reformation principle of sola Scriptura from a time when most believers had no copy of the text to one in which everyone has free access and somehow no longer has time to read it.
The proclaimed Word is the load-bearing wall of Reformed worship. Gwinn watches Presbyterians shave minutes off the sermon for committee updates and musical responses, and asks what we are giving away when we treat preaching as a part of worship rather than as worship itself.
October 31, 1517: Luther nails ninety-five theological challenges to a church door in Wittenberg, and the world soon catches fire. Dawson tells the story of the question that haunted Luther for years before that morning, and the answer that, once found, set everything in motion.
Luther was supposed to become a lawyer; his ambitious father had a plan. A thunderstorm changed the plan. Barnes follows the personal story of how an unlikely candidate became the central figure of European Christianity in the 1500s, and what we still learn from his unexpected calling.
Does the preaching model of Luther, Zwingli, Oecolampadius, Bullinger, and Calvin still speak to a generation shaped by smart phones, Hulu, and Instagram? Gibbons argues that the Reformers' way of preaching is not a museum piece but a working practice, and shows how it travels into the digital age.
Selderhuis traces Reformation commemorations all the way back to 1617, when Friedrich V of the Palatinate first proposed a centennial celebration. What the jubilees have meant has shifted with each generation; this one looks back from the vantage of a Europe that no longer assumes Christian assumptions.
Luther had a mistress, or thought he did, and he sometimes called her Reason. Burnett uses Luther's polemic to recover something the Reformers actually believed about reason: a gift of God to be cherished and exercised, but never the master of revelation.
Pelikan called the Reformation a tragic necessity, and Gatewood holds the two halves of that phrase together. The piece reads as both celebration of the Word's work in the Reformers' generation and lament over the divisions their work left for us to inherit.
Dearman reads the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles as the Old Testament's primary picture of corporate failure, and as the matrix N.T. Wright says shaped Jesus' announcement of the kingdom. The PCUSA's own systemic failures put us in conversation with that text from the inside.
October 31, 1517 was meant to be a scholarly debate among theologians at the University of Wittenberg. McGlasson works back into the local controversy over indulgences, finds an early version of the modern prosperity gospel, and argues the first thesis still says the load-bearing thing.
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